I recall* Manhattan has a “green wave” thing going on, if you hit the right speed you will get green after green. However, getting more then 10 or 20 in a row surely requires some creativity and skill on the part of the driver.

The number of successes has me leaning toward purposeful coordination.

At a certain point he starts running a loop. I could only tell because he passed the same blue light special at least twice before I stopped. Watching vans pull out in front of him and him swerve to miss them was more stressful at 2x than I would have figured.

I’m guessing tracks like the one he found are something most of us don’t see but taxi drivers and “rideshare” folks might.

It’s also far easier to do this at 3 am when this video was taken. I’m sure this was done on the major N/S roads which are likely to have preferential flow treatment vs cross traffic. Try doing this in the middle of the day and you’re gonna have a bad time.

Also, keep in mind Manhattan has traffic lights at literally every single intersection.

Not saying this isn’t oddly satisfying but it wasn’t some kind of traffic sorcery or anything.

Yeah the Manhattan grid makes this barely possible. I worked on a traffic signal system in Melbourne and the best it could realistically do is give you a green wave on one arterial road during peak times, in one direction.